Will Chatham

I have res­ur­rected the image gallery por­tion of this site. Woohoo! Lots of pic­tures for all 4 vis­i­tors to look at. Check out Will’s Ye Olde Photo Gallery.

At first I installed Gallery to man­age the pho­tos. I tried Gallery out about 3 years ago and wasn’t that impressed. Since then it seems to have made a lot of progress. It installs eas­ily and seems to be rather easy to man­age. How­ever, there is one big prob­lem with it that bugged me: it’s not Web Stan­dards com­pli­ant. The fea­tures offered in Gallery were almost enough to allow me to ignore this, but in the end, my morals took over and I ditched it for some­thing better.

Enter Sim­ple PHP Gallery, which you might have seen used on this site before. This pro­gram too has made leaps and bounds of progress since I last used it. It was so easy to install (upload and go), I thought I was launch­ing rub­ber frogs from a Turk­ish cat­a­pult. No, I don’t know what that means either.

Granted, Sim­ple PHP Gallery doesn’t have quite as many fea­tures as Gallery. How­ever, it makes up for that in other ways. Not only does it val­i­date as XHTML Strict, it was pretty easy to inte­grate into my site’s exist­ing design. This was not true of the pro­gram last time I tried it, nor is it true of Gallery.

Addi­tion­ally, Sim­ple PHP Gallery has a much smaller foot­print on the server in both speed and size. Tak­ing advan­tage of PHP’s GD Library, it cre­ates thumb­nails and resizes images on the fly. Oh, did I men­tion it val­i­dates as XHTML Strict???

Any­way, keep an eye on Will’s Ye Olde Photo Gallery for lots of kewl stuff. I just uploaded the first batch of pics from my new Nokia 3620 cam­era phone, and am impressed with the res­o­lu­tion for a free phone. There are also some new pics from my Olym­pus C5050 and my Sony Handycam.

Geez, this took for­ever to say all this stuff. I gotta stop this stream-of-conscience writ­ing thing.

Will or Napoleon Dynamite?

You decide.

Reported by the AP:

“Last week, Microsoft Chair­man Bill Gates (news — web sites) con­firmed plans to sell antivirus prod­ucts to both con­sumers and big busi­nesses by the end of the year. But the Red­mond com­pany is mum on cost and features.

Speak­ing at a secu­rity con­fer­ence, Gates also said the com­pany would give con­sumers a free tool for com­bat­ing spy­ware, a pesky and grow­ing threat that can mon­i­tor users’ activ­i­ties, hin­der com­puter per­for­mance and cre­ate other has­sles. Microsoft also will sell a more sophis­ti­cated anti­spy­ware prod­uct to businesses.“

It’s nice of them to give the end user a free tool to com­bat spy­ware. But turn­ing around and charg­ing peo­ple and busi­nesses for antivirus and the pro­fes­sional ver­sion of the spy­ware tool is the most ludi­crous thing I have ever heard.

Why are they charg­ing you to fix their unse­cure software???

I do not see how they can get away with this. This would be sim­i­lar to a con­trac­tor charg­ing you for the shin­gles he for­got to put on the roof of your house and pay to repair the fur­ni­ture dam­aged by the rain that got in.

Unfor­tu­nately, Pres­i­dent Bush signed the law that lim­its class action law­suits last week, so there is not much hope of doing any­thing about this.

That Mac Mini is look­ing bet­ter and bet­ter every day.